What to expect from Scroll’s modular content design training
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By Andrew Charlesworth
Andrew is a content strategist and Scroll consultant. He specialises in helping organisations measure and improve the impact of their content and efficiently manage its life cycle. He's trained content designers from public and private sector, journalists, and PR execs.
It’s not like other content design training courses
Expect lessons from aviation, manufacturing, mathematics, medicine, business strategy, change management, journalism and even a smidgen of military tactics as well as content design best practice.
‘Training’ may be something of a misnomer for Scroll’s modular content design course. It’s a mix of practical exercises, strategy workshops, process analysis and self-help as much as conventional training.
This is deliberate. As a ‘trainer’, I want to get away from what conventional training implies and instead do something that will be more useful for the people who attend, for the organisations they work for, and for the users their websites serve.
Motivation
Conventional training assumes some lack of knowledge on the part of the attendees. They can’t do their job as well as they could because they lack some knowledge or technique. So the employing organisation - or sometimes the trainee themselves - identifies the lack and books training.
In conventional training, a knowledgeable trainer tells the attendees what they lack. Usually that’s something the trainer has said to numerous trainees many times in the past with scant regard to the specific context of the trainees’ day-to-day job. After imparting their knowledge, the trainer oversees a couple of exercises to demonstrate the trainee has understood the training, takes their fee, and declares the attendees ‘trained’.
However, my experience as both trainee and trainer, has taught me this primary school-level model is often a waste of the organisation’s money and of trainees’ time.
Mostly, people I have trained don’t lack knowledge or capability, otherwise the organisation probably wouldn't have hired them to do the job. Mostly they know how to do their job well. They may lack experience, but rarely lack capability or knowledge.
Blockers
Usually what they lack, most pertinently, is the agency to do their job well in the organisation. They know what they should be doing, but they experience blockers - processes, stakeholders, systems, management, culture, legacy methodologies or misplaced beliefs - that prevent them from excelling.
It’s their lack of agency, not lack of knowledge, which forces them into inefficient and ineffective ways of working that result in them delivering a suboptimal service in their organisational context.
I learned this on my first training gig in 1997. I was hired to run a 2-day writing course for a PR agency team. “They can’t write”, was the complaint from the client, a large technology company. I went in with my slides and exercises, like a good trainer. But after an hour or two, it became obvious they could write. They were all graduates from decent universities.
So I spent an hour or so listening to them talk about what was going wrong in the client relationship.
They were arts or humanities graduates, so they didn’t understand their client’s technologies. And the client wasn’t taking time to explain, either. Often they’d get thrown a few powerpoint slides without notes and expected to write a 5-page press release for technology journalists. At best, they’d get a 15-minute mobile phone call from the product manager on his way to the airport.
Their output was unsatisfactory to the client because the input was so utterly poor.
So we scrapped my prepared course and worked on interview training instead. Over the 2 days we developed briefing checklists, honed their questioning technique with lots of roleplay, and made a promise to each other: ‘never leave the briefing in the fog of confusion’.
One of the senior participants emailed his manager and said it was the best work training he’d ever had. I was so pleased because it was my first training commission.
But it also made me realise how dire off-the-shelf training can be.
User needs
My ‘writing’ training succeeded because it wasn’t about writing. Instead it identified the underlying reason for the client’s dissatisfaction, and gave the attendees some tools to tackle it.
Hence Scroll’s modular training includes reviewing and agreeing the standards to which the content design job should be done. But it will also dig into how attendees achieve those standards in their organisation.
That means we do a big dollop of content strategy together to uncover what changes attendees need to make to succeed, how they go about making them, and, above all, what will empower them to succeed.
I don’t have all the ready-made answers to those questions before the training starts. But I’ve seen plenty of similar environments. So I can guide the discussion and ask leading questions that help attendees uncover what will give them agency to improve.
Clearly, I have an approximate destination in mind for the training, and a planned route for getting there. But I don’t know for certain where we’ll end up. And I’ve learned I should be prepared to throw away the map and chart a new course depending on what my first engagement with the trainees uncovers.
That’s the advantage of Scroll’s modular, tailored training over the conventional kind. It’s driven by user needs. The trainees are the users.
Therapy
That may make content design training sound like some hippy therapy session. I suppose there is an analogy between personal therapy and this model of training. It deals with what will empower you to make desirable changes.
It also blurs the lines between training, consultancy, strategy and change management.
That means I won’t be standing up front telling attendees what to do while they slide into training room-induced narcolepsy. Instead, there will be a lot of interaction and interruption; attendees answering my questions, challenging me, telling me where it goes wrong, coming up with ideas, writing stuff on post-its, and all of us working together to see what viable solutions emerge.
Furthermore, training is a safe space. No attendee should be judged for lack of knowledge, lack of experience in a particular area, or a preconceived idea about their job that differs from other people’s.
In fact, training is a great place to make ‘mistakes’. Training is, if anything, learning from mistakes, and doing so in a place where mistakes don’t have the consequences they would if you made them in your actual job.
For anyone considering booking Scroll’s training, I’d encourage them to embrace the process. You get out as much as you’re prepared to put in.
Talk to us about how our training can meet the needs of your content team.
Read more about Scroll’s content design training